OUR AMERICA: Greater America

- By Ulvija Tanović

Across our Facebook newsfeeds, we Balkanites like to accuse each other of a particular form of navel-gazing that verges on conspiracy theory. We often fall prey to seeing our relatively unimportant little region, down at the unfashionable end of Europe, as the belly button of the world. It’s a defence mechanism at heart. Because the world actually won’t give us the time of day, unless we’re spectacularly slaughtering each other; in times of relative, unspectacular peace, we try to infiltrate world affairs by posing as jaded know-it-alls, sages who’ve seen it all before. A sort of grand, historical “been there, done that”. So now that Trump has won the presidency on the promise to “Make America Great Again,” it will take all our notoriously nonexistent self-control to refrain from drawing parallels between this nascent Greater America and the—to us all too familiar and disastrous—project of Greater Serbia.

Which all started in 1389, of course. Our internecine grievances predate by more than a century the discovery of your continent by that misguided Genoese adventurer, sailing under the Spanish flag on a crusading corporate mission. But I’ll spare you the prehistory and take you back only as far as the summer of 1989. The Berlin Wall hadn’t fallen yet, and even though it was about to, no one was expecting it. The Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia hadn’t yet dissolved, and nobody saw that coming either, although the beginning of its descent into the worst bloodshed in Europe since the Second World War would later be traced back to precisely that summer, and, even more precisely, to a speech given by the then head of the government of Serbia, Slobodan Milošević, to mark the six hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo. In 1389 a medieval Serb army was defeated in this battle by Ottoman invaders, making it possible for the Muslim empire to establish its rule over part of Europe for the next five hundred years. Addressing a crowd estimated at one million people, Milošević’s speech has become infamous as the first time where the future indicted war criminal mentioned the possibility of armed conflict in Yugoslavia. To my mind, however, the veiled threat of state violence is nothing compared to his far more ominous promise to make Serbia great again:

Serbs have never in the whole of their history conquered and exploited others [. . .]They liberated themselves and when they could they also helped others to liberate themselves. The fact that in this region they are a major nation is not a Serbian sin or shame; this is an advantage which they have not used against others, but I must say that here, in this big, legendary field of Kosovo, the Serbs have not used the advantage of being great for their own benefit either.

Thanks to their leaders and politicians and their vassal mentality they felt guilty before themselves and others. This situation lasted for decades, it lasted for years and here we are now at the field of Kosovo to say that this is no longer the case.[1]

Earlier that year, making good on his campaign promises, Milošević had pushed through changes to the constitution of Serbia, drastically reducing the rights of its Albanian minority concentrated in the province of Kosovo. If he hadn’t, his speech would not have had such an ominous ring. Indeed, the unremarkable nationalistic posturing would have never ended up sounding so ominous if it had not been followed by a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing, one that included razing cities to the ground, the longest siege of a city in modern history, prison camps, mass rape, mass deportation, and mass murder, sometimes qualified as genocide—all of these atrocities justified by the necessity of protecting a ruling majority from an allegedly threatening minority. Words, especially those uttered by politicians, though loud, are often empty. Actions, however, speak volumes, even when they sound like silence.

So why am I telling you all this? I believe it is precisely this mytho-logic—protecting the ruling majority from the alleged threat posed by an othered minority—that has now swept across America. Much like Milošević, Trump rode the wave of this mytho-logic to the presidency. Many politicians across Europe have already ridden, or are hoping to ride, their own waves of anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-Other hysteria to their own respective seats of power.

The problem isn’t simply seeing the racism in Trump and still electing him president. The real problem is not seeing the racism everywhere else. It’s not just who you put in the White House. It’s who you put in prison. And what you do with them once they’re in there. Trump didn’t invent waterboarding. Or drone strikes. Or the Keystone Pipeline. And all those things are racist.

I could have said only that all these things were wrong, but that wouldn’t get much of a rise out of you. Even with all your shock and horror at this cataclysmic election, you’re not really worried about your skin. You know you’ll be fine, precisely because of your skin. You’re worried about being called racist. That’s the worst that could happen to you. And if you still maintain that you’re not racist, then you’re complicit, or, even worse, complacent. And you can’t afford to be, because, like it or not, if you’re white, then Trump was elected in your name, and everything he does will be done in your name.

So, how do you fight back? How do you stop being racist, or complicit, or even worse, complacent? Simple: Don’t make America great again. And even more importantly, don’t kid yourself that it ever was. For others, that is. The greatness of any nation always comes at the expense of others: those it excludes, segregates, imprisons, documents or undocuments, impoverishes, silences. Those that it seeks to erase. Such is the greatness Trump is promising, but he didn’t invent it. It was always there.

Look, the simple fact that there was a need for a Black Lives Matter movement while Barack Obama was president should tell you: it’s not who you put in the White House. The House is always White­­.

Read more voices on #OurAmerica here.